Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
-
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note:
- I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress
- Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked
- A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors
- I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred
- There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains
- The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts
- I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
-
You might be better off starting over with a new domain. Getting the penalty lifted can be a long road and if you have little invested in keeping the domain,(links etc) I'd move on. Maybe the ".org" version of your name, assuming the penalized one was a ".com"
Best,
-
Turns out we had a Pure Spam manual action on our domain. I'm assuming this was due to a previous owner's shady activities since the domain was first registered in 2011. I've submitted a detailed request for review.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website dropped out from Google index
Howdy, fellow mozzers. I got approached by my friend - their website is https://www.hauteheadquarters.com She is saying that they dropped from google index over night - and, as you can see if you google their name, website url or even site: , most of the pages are not indexed. Home page is nowhere to be found - that's for sure. I know that they were indexed before. Google webmaster tools don't have any manual actions (at least yet). No sudden changes in content or backlink profile. robots.txt has some weird rule - disallow everything for EtaoSpider. I don't know if google would listen to that - robots checker in GWT says it's all good. Any ideas why that happen? Any ideas what I should check? P.S. Just noticed in GWT there was a huge drop in indexed pages within first week of August. Still no idea why though. P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers... Anyone knows where this can be set?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Google Indexing of Images
Our site is experiencing an issue with indexation of images. The site is real estate oriented. It has 238 listings with about 1190 images. The site submits two version (different sizes) of each image to Google, so there are about 2,400 images. Only several hundred are indexed. Can adding Microdata improve the indexation of the images? Our site map is submitting images that are on no-index listing pages to Google. As a result more than 2000 images have been submitted but only a few hundred have been indexed. How should the site map deal with images that reside on no-index pages? Do images that are part of pages that are set up as "no-index" need a special "no-index" label or special treatment? My concern is that so many images that not indexed could be a red flag showing poor quality content to Google. Is it worth investing in correcting this issue, or will correcting it result in little to no improvement in SEO? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
New website won't rank for branded keywords in Google, but does in Bing
We launched a website in October www.butterfly.com. The branded product name "Butterfly Body Liners" will not rank until page 2 of Google, but it ranks #1 in Bing. Organic traffic never really picked up so it's not easy to tell if it's been "hit" by any penalty. The strange thing is, this website: http://archive.is/PQZdO is ranking #1. This is an archived version of the site. Does anyone have any insight as to why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LaughlinConstable0 -
Is there anyway to recover my site's rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. My conclusions is I was dropped by Google because of poor quality links I've gained over 10+ years. I have a Domain Authority of 40, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 42, user reviews and quality content. Since Oct 2012 I've done some technical improvements and managed to get a few questionable links removed. I've continued blogging reguarly and got more active on Twitter. I've seen no improvement and my traffic is 80% down on last year. It would be great to be able to produce content that others want to link to but I've not had much success from that in over 10 years of trying and I've not seen many others in my sector, with small budgets having much success. Is there anything I can do to regain favour with Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Can you see the 'indexing rules' that are in place for your own site?
By 'index rules' I mean the stipulations that constitute whether or not a given page will be indexed. If you can see them - how?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0